About waiting

When we wait we are faced with the fact that we often do not know what will come next. We wait our entire lives for different matters such as housing, medical results, jobs, death, asylum, money, a better life, pregnancy, affirmation, love, people, mail, bureaucracy, recovery, the train, climate change, health or in traffic. Some of these matters are more essential than others  but they all have an impact on how we live our lives and what our possibilities are. 

The issue with waiting for the more essential matters is that we are confronted with the fact that other people are moving forward while we are being put on hold, whether it’s temporary or permanent. Waiting for something we need can prevent us from participating in certain areas of our lives. It can force us to move at a slower pace, to take a break from what we are doing or it can prevent us from moving forward at all. 

This can be extremely painful because of society’s constant expectation that we should be productive and develop our lives at all times next to the fact that we are constantly told that we are responsible for our own situations. Waiting is seen as unproductive, as lost time, as falling behind and as something that puts us outside of a functioning society. A society that we can rejoin once we are back up to speed. 

But the thing with these waiting situations is that we usually have no control over them. This can leave us feeling powerless, frightened, uncertain, impatient, scared, bored or isolated. For example, many people are waiting to find a new house to be able to start a family or move to the next phase in their lives. They are getting stuck in their current lives. The same goes for finding a job, getting medical treatment, receiving your citizenship or waiting to run out of money. 

On this platform we don’t want to look at waiting as standing still or failure. Here we want to emphasize the shared experience of waiting. It’s a place to share, to listen and to stand up for your waiting situation without having the feeling that you are the only one or that it’s your fault.